A co-worker recently loaned me The Phoenix Project, which I’ve subsequently been reading the train for the last few weeks.  If you’re an IT Operations manager who feels like IT bears the brunt of your firm’s problems (and let’s face it, what IT manager doesn’t feel that way?) it’s a great read.  More than once I caught myself thinking “Wow, this is just like my company.”
The book dispels a number of myths like “IT is knowledge work and is nothing like manufacturing operations” through close comparisons to managing work-in-progress (WIP) and the Toyota “Kata” (continuous improvement). Â While the term DevOps gets thrown around a lot, the essence of the book is that IT is ingrained in almost every firm and thus is far more critical to the success or failure of the business than most executives suspect. Â I wish the authors had spent a chapter on how best to prioritize the four types of work (business projects, internal projects, planned changes, and unplanned incidents), but overall I highly recommend it to anyone – not just IT managers.